An Aztec Folio

Text 4: Diego Durán: The Flaying of Men
Tr. by DKJ

Young man wearing the skin of a sactificial victim to impersonate Xipe Totec, god of springtime.
(National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City)

Fray (“Brother”) Diego Durán (ca 1537-1588) was a Dominican friar, born in Spain. He arrived in Mexico City in about 1556, some 35 years after the end of the Aztec empire, and he was very much interested in the history of Mexico in earlier times. Although he was tireless in inquiring about traditional life, he also had his own theories about historical connections of some unknown kind that would explain any similarities he might find between Mexico and Spain (as in section 40), or about unities of human experience that might lead to a kind of inherent Trinitarianism (as in section 3)

The following brief account of the sacrifices in honor of Xipe Totec, “the flayed man,” provides a reconstruction of these rituals based on memories of one-time participants, interspersed with interpretation and speculation. The text makes up nearly all of chapter 9 of his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, volume 1, which probably dates from about 1570, after he had been in Mexico for another twenty years, although it was not published until long after his death.

Linguistic Note: The Spanish text here is based on a reprint with annotations by Angel Ma. Garibay (Durán 1570: 95-103). Paragraph divisions and numbering are new here. Durán’s spellings and etymologies have not been modified, but some explanatory notes have been insinuated into the English text. For an English translation of the entire book, see Horcasitas & Heyden (Durán 1971:172-185).

which means “flaying of men”, when an idol was honored named Totec, Xipe, and Tlatlahqui-Tezcatl [“red mirror”], names under which he was worshipped as a triad. He was also known by the names Tota [“our father”], Topiltzin [“our blessed child”], and Yollometl [“heart maguey”], meaning “father,” “son,” and “the heart of both,” all honored at this festival.

2. On the twentieth of March, one day after the Holy Church celebrates the feast of the glorious Saint Joseph, the Indians of this region celebrated a most solemn festival, one so joyous and so bloody and so costly in human lives that no other one was greater. It was called Tlacaxipehualiztli, which means “the Flaying of Men,” and it was the first festival of the year, according to their calendar, celebrated after each twenty units of twenty days.

3. In these feasts, they celebrated an idol which was unitary, but was worshipped under three names, and which, having three names, they worshiped under one form, just as we believe in the Holy Trinity, which is three distinct persons and one true God. Similarly this blind nation believes this idol to be one under the names Totec, Xipe, and Tlatlauhqui-Tezcatl. We shall need to explain these names in order to understand what they mean, and how all of the ceremonies and solemnity were performed in honor of these three names, together and individually.

4. The first name is Totec. Although at the outset I could not understand this and it was obscure, finally, after asking over and over, I found out that it means “the frightening and terrifying lord.” The second is Xipe, which means “the man who has been flayed and treated badly.” The third name —Tlatlauqui-Tezcatl— means “mirror of blazing brilliance.”

5. He was not a local deity, worshipped only here and there. His festival was universal across the whole country, and everyone honored him as a universal god. He was so honored and feared, that he had his own temple and all possible honor and splendor.

6. More men were killed in his celebration than in any other, since it was the most generally celebrated, so that even in the most humble villages and in the small neighborhoods people were sacrificed on this day. The more I write and inquire, the more I marvel at the number of rational people who would die each year, sacrificed to the demon, a number we can affirm is greater than those who died a natural death.

7. To see that this is so, anyone who wishes to compare it will see it is true and will see that on this single day of Tlacaxipehualiztli, the name of the festival which we shall be describing, in Mexico City alone at least sixty people died, and traveling through all the provinces, cities, and kingdoms, he will see that on this day several thousand and more were sacrificed, not including any of the other festivals, none of which were celebrated without killing men or women.

8. The image and figure of this idol were of stone, the height of a person, with an open mouth, like a person speaking, dressed in the skin of a sacrificed man, with the hands of the skin hanging from his wrists. In his right hand he had a walking stick with rattles attached to the top of it, and in his left hand he held a shield made of yellow and red feathers, and with a little red ribbon with feathers at the end hanging from behind the handle.

9. He had a kind of crown on his head, in red and fastened with a red ribbon, with an elegant bow on his forehead and a golden jewel in the middle of the bow. On his back there hung another crown, from which three little banners stuck out, with three ribbons hanging down, all of them red, in honor of the three names of the idol. He also wore a solemn and elegant loincloth, which seemed to come from within the human skin in which he was dressed. This was his costume throughout, without its ever being changed or modified.

10. Forty days before the day of the festival, people dressed an Indian like the idol, with the same costuming, so that he could serve as a living idol. And to this purified slave they all made as much honor and observance as to the idol, displaying him in public. And the same was done in every district (like our parishes, each with a name and patron idol, with its own house which served as a church in that district). In each district they dressed up a slave, just as in the main temple, to represent the idol. (This was not done in the other festivals of the year.) So if there were twenty districts, twenty Indians representing this universal god could be walking around, with each district honoring and reverencing its Indian representing god, just as was done in the main temple.

11. As I understand it, on this festival they honored all of the gods together as a single unit, and to show this I note that on the day of the festival, early in the morning, they brought out this Indian, who for forty days had been representing the living idol. And after him came someone impersonating the sun, and then ones dressed as Huitzilopochtli and as Quetzlcoatl, and as an idol called Macuilxochitl, and one dressed as Chililico, and one as Tlacahuepan, Ixtlilton, and Mayahuel, in short the gods of the main districts. And they killed them, one after the other, cutting out their hearts as in ordinary sacrifice and holding them up to the east, and then throwing them to a place called zacapan, which means “on the straw,” where the sacrificer of gods positioned himself, and then, as he stood there, people came with offerings. They presented bundles of ears of maize, which the Indians hang from ceilings the same way the Spanish hang grapes.

12. (Before I forget, I should note that these handfuls of maize cobs hung up like this are superstition and idolatry and old offerings. The handfuls of maize cobs they offered there had to be set on leaves of green sapodillas, which had their own aura of mystery and omen.)

13. After they had sacrificed the gods, they skinned them in great haste, beginning as I have said here, by pulling out each one’s heart and offering it to the east, and then —the skinners had this task— throwing down each dead body and splitting it from the neck to the heel, skinning it the way one does with a sheep, removing the whole skin as a single piece.

14. When the skinning had been finished, they gave the meat to whoever had owned the Indian. And other Indians immediately dressed themselves in the skins and took on the same names of the gods that the others had represented, putting over them the same clothes and symbols of those gods, each of them assuming the name of the god he represented and acting the part. And as they did this, one faced the east, one the west, one the north, and one the south, and each one walked a bit that way towards the crowd, and pulled along certain Indians with him, as though they were captives, demonstrating his power. This part was called neteoquiliztli, which means “acting like a god.”

15. When this ceremony was finished, which meant that everything was a single power and a unity, these gods joined themselves together, and they tied the right foot of one to the left foot of the next, and tied them clear up to the knee, so that they walked the rest of the day holding each other up, by which, as I have said, they demonstrated their equality and conformity and showed their power and unity.

16. Then they took them, still tied together, to the sacrificial ground, called the cuauhxicalco [“place of the eagle vessel”], which was a smooth, whitewashed patio about seven fathoms square. [A Spanish braza or fathom is today defined as 1.6718 meters, about five and a half feet.] This patio had two stones, one called temalcatl, which means “stone wheel,” and the other called cuauhxicalli, which means “[eagle] vessel.” Each stone was a fathom across, and they were fixed in the patio next to each other. [The term cuauhxicalli was broadly applied to vessels in which hearts were placed in the course of sacrifice.]

17. When they had been positioned there, four men came out, wearing armor, two with emblems of jaguars and the others with emblems of eagles, all four with shields and swords in their hands. The two who carried jaguar emblems were called the “greater jaguar” and the “lesser jaguar,” and similarly those with the emblems of eagles were the “greater eagle” and the “lesser eagle.” They positioned themselves around the “gods.”

18. Then all the dignitaries of the temples appeared, in order, bringing out a drum with them, and began a song associated with the festival and with the idol. Then an old man came out, dressed in a mountain lion skin, and with him four others, one dressed in white, one in green, one in yellow, and one in red, gods they call the “four dawns,” and with them the gods Ixcozauhqui and Titiacahuan. The old man positioned them and then brought one of the prisoners who was to be sacrificed and had him climb up onto the stone called the temalacatl, which had a hole in the center from which a rope stuck out, about four fathoms long, which was called the centzonmecatl [“grass rope”]. [The most famous surviving temalacatl is the “Stone of Emperor Tizoc” in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It is covered with magnificent bas-relief conquest scenes. Although Durán probably was referring to this, it was surely not representative of humbler stones used elsewhere.]

19. With this rope they tied the prisoner by a foot, and they gave him a shield and sword, made of feathers, in one hand, and the made him drink a cup of “divine wine,” called teooctli. Soon they placed four wooden balls at the feet of this naked man. And as soon as the old man (who was called “the old jaguar”) departed, then accompanied by the drum and the song, the “greater jaguar” dancing with his shield and sword, approached the prisoner, who picked up the wooden balls and threw them at him. [It has been speculated that teooctli or “gods’ pulque” may have contained pain-killers, hallucinogens, or other chemical agents designed to improve the “performance” of dying captives.]

20. The “greater jaguar,” who was skillful, deflected the missiles with his shield, and when the balls were used up, then the unfortunate prisoner used his [feather] shield and [feather] sword to defend himself against the greater jaguar, who tried to hurt him. Since one was armed and the other naked, one had a sword with blades and the other had a sword only of wood and feathers, after a few strokes the captive would be hurt on the leg or the thigh or the arms or the head. Once he had been injured, they tolled the horns and conch shells and flutes, as the prisoner fell. After he had fallen the sacrificers arrived, untied him, and took him to the other stone, the one we said was called cuauhxicalli, and there they cut open his chest and removed his heart and offered it to the sun, holding it high.

21. In the same way that I have just described they sacrificed thirty or forty prisoners one by one, with the old jaguar bringing them out and tying them there, and with the four jaguars and eagles all at hand so that when one got tired another was available, and if all of them got tired and there were many prisoners still to go, the ones called the “four dawns” helped them. (They had to fight left-handed, a feature of their office, but they were as skillful in using the left hand to wound as they were using the right hand.)

22. Also the captive had license to wound and kill as he defended himself against those who attacked him. In fact, there were captives so spirited and so skillful with the balls that they threw or with the shield and wooden sword they wielded, and who defended themselves so valiantly, that they even killed the greater jaguar or the lesser jaguar, or the greater or lesser eagle. And there were some who untied the rope by which they were bound and, once they were loose, attacked their attacker, and both would be killed, which happened when the prisoner had been a person of importance, who had been a war captain when he had been captured. Others were such pusillanimous cowards that, seeing themselves tied up, they gave up and simply squatted and let themselves be wounded.

23. This combat lasted until all the prisoners had been sacrificed. All of them had to pass through this ceremony, which they call tlahuahuanaliztli, which means “marking or scratching” with a sword. It our language it would be called toque [“touched”] in fencing with foils. And so anyone who fought a prisoner and had drawn blood from the foot, hand, head, or some other body part, would leave combat, and then they would sound the instruments and sacrifice the wounded man. This way those who were tied up, in order to have a bit more life, protected themselves from being wounded, with great spirit and skill, even though they came, in the end, to die.

24. This combat and this mode of sacrifice continued all day, and forty or fifty Indians would die this way, not counting those killed in the districts where the impersonators of the idol had come from. It was a thing causing great compassion, pity, and great pain.

25. All the city attended the spectacle, held at the same temple of the idol to whom the sacrifice was offered. It was a special and showy temple, both for its height and for all of the features of its sacrificial stones. The oratory or hall where the idol was kept was small but decorated well and elegantly. In front of the room was a whitewashed patio, seven or eight fathoms square, where the two fixed stones were, and to reach them four stairways of four steps each: one painted with the image of the sun and the others with the count of years, months, and days. There were many rooms around this patio, where they kept the skins of those who had been skinned during the forty days, and which were to be buried at the end of this time in a vault or cellar at the foot of the stairways.

26. We have heard much [lately] about the two stones of which I have made mention —the one where they sacrificed and the one where they finished sacrificing— since one of them could be seen in the Great Square for a long time, next to the drain where the daily market takes place in front of the royal palace. There a bunch of Negroes would constantly gather to play with it and commit other atrocities, killing each other. (This is why the most illustrious and most reverend Lord Fray Alfonso de Montúfar, of holy and praiseworthy memory, the most dignified Archbishop of Mexico and of the Dominican Order, had it buried, because of the ongoing memory of the ancient sacrifices that were performed on it.)

27. The second stone was the one that was dug up again at the site where the Iglesia Mayor of Mexico is being constructed and is now at the door of the Perdón [the confessional area on the west side of the church]. This one was called the “vessel” by the ancients because of the indentation in the middle, and the channel through which the blood flowed of those who had been sacrificed on it, who were more numerous than the hairs of my head. I would like to see this cleared out. And when the old church is taken down and the new one [today’s Cathedral] completed, I’d also like to see them remove the pillar bases with heads of snakes that used to be around the patio of Huitzilopochtli, for I know that some old men and women have been going and crying over the destruction of their temple when they see these relics. I trust to the divine goodness that they have not been going there to worship these stones and not God.

28. In honor of this festival and by way of ceremony they generally ate a meal of maize tortillas and tamale kneaded with honey and beans, and they were not to eat any other kind of bread, for it would have been a sacrilege and contrary to divine decrees.

29. When all that I have described was done, those who had represented the gods, who had been dressed in the human skins, went away [after] the priests had removed them, washed them with their own hands, and hung them with much reverence on poles.

30. Early the next morning some people went to the owners of those who had been skinned to ask to borrow the skins to go and beg for alms. The owners would then order that they be lent the skins. They did this in all the districts, and they, the poor, dressed themselves in those skins and over them wore the clothes of the idol Xipe, and they went out into all parts of the city to beg alms from door to door. These almoners numbered twenty to twenty-five, depending to the number of districts.

31. They were not to run into each other, whether in a house, on the streets, or at a crossroads, and if one almoner ran into another one somewhere, they attacked each other and had to fight and struggle until the skins and clothing had been torn, for such was the statute and decree of the temples.

32. So they avoided encountering one another, and for this they brought along a great many little boys, and people who warned them, and who carried for them the gifts that they received. There was a superstition concerning these gifts, that no one could refuse the request to give, but must give something, whether little or much. What they gave for the most part were ears of corn, squash, beans, and many seeds, each according to his ability. Some would offer bread and meat and pieces of pumpkin cooked with honey. Others gave bread which had been cooked and left over from the previous day. Still others, aristocrats and important people, gave more valuable things, such as blankets, loin cloths, sandals, feather work, or jewels.

33. All of this was collected together at the temple, and when the twenty days dedicated to begging ended, each of the almoners had to divide all that had been collected with the master of the slave whose skin he had worn. Many poor people relieved their needs in this way. Those who begged alms had to take the skins back to the temple every night, where they were kept in a special hall, and where each morning the almoners would return for them.

34. Women with children in their arms went to these almoners as they passed through the street and asked for their blessing, the same way people now ask for blessings from monks. The “Xipes” would take them in their arms and, saying I know not what words to the little creatures, they would walk four times around the patio of the house and then return the child to its mother, who took it and gave alms.

35. When the twenty days dedicated to the idol were over (like one of our octaves), the almoners stopped. On that day a ceremony was begun to bury the skins and remove [all trace of] them from those who had worn them. They put a drum in the middle of the market and all the old soldiers and captains came out who had captured in war those who had been sacrificed, all with new insignia and with prizes that the kings had given them, all with their net capes, and the warriors danced around the almoners, dressed in their skins.

36. And on each day of this solemnity and festival, which lasted twenty days, they took off one or two of the skins. And they ate and drank through the festival and rejoiced in every way together, so that when it came to an end, the skins, which stank already, were so black and abominable that it was revolting and horrible to see them.

37. After these festive and solemn forty days, they took all the skins and buried them in the subterranean vault I mentioned at the foot of the stairways in the temple of the idol Xipe. It had a stone entry that could be removed and replaced. They buried them with song and solemnity, like sacred things. Everyone in the land attended this, each at his own temple, where, when the burial was finished there was a very solemn sermon by one of the dignitaries, full of rhetoric and metaphor, in the most elegant language that he could manage.

38. In the sermon, the speaker spoke of human misery, and of our baseness, and of how much we owe to him who gave us the existence that we have. He admonished everyone to lead a quiet and peaceful life and praised fear, reverence, shame, breeding, respect, good conduct, submission, obedience, and charity towards the poor and to wandering strangers. He condemned theft, fornication, adultery, and the desire for things belonging to others.

39. Finally he extolled all sorts of virtues and forbade all sorts of evils, just as a Catholic preacher would rail and preach, with all the fervor in the world, promising that he who sinned would leave behind a bad and perverse name and would descend into hell with the same reputation and would be kept there by it. And he admonished the good and urged them to remain so and promised them a quiet and pacific life, promising that the lord above would reward them and that they would leave this life for the next with a good name and be much honored.

40. All I have said here, with the rest, shows these people to have had a notion of God’s law and of the Holy Gospel and the Beatitudes, for they preached that there will be rewards for the good and punishment for the iniquitous. I asked the Indians about the old preachers, and I wrote down the sermons they preached, with the same rhetoric and phrases and metaphors, and truly they were Catholics. And I was filled with admiration at the knowledge they had of the Beatitudes and of the eternal rest in the next life, and consequently of the necessity to live well in order to attain these things.

41. But this was so mixed with such bloody and abominable idolatries that it tarnished anything good involved with it. I speak of this because [I think] there was some preacher in this land that left them this information. I pray to our blessed Lord, blessed and praised forever, who was willing to save these miserable people from such great errors and such blind servitude, who destroyed the abominable sacrifice to a demon of blood and hearts of men. Some of them recognize to the gentle Law of God and give praise to Him who has given them such a great beneficence. May He be praised forever.